I designed and built elegant, beautiful and high-conversion hotel websites.

I worked in the hotel travel sector for about three years and had a very good experience there. I won a few awards as part of that team of amazing and brilliant designers.

My role began as a simple Web Designer, but later, I directed design and production for
TravelClick’s custom CMS in the U.S. and
Mexico, working with TravelClick partners to design and develop websites for
Latin America.

I must say, my time at TravelClick changed my life and career.

That's no rhetoric.

Winner of multiple awards and honors

TravelClick has amazing design talent that truly know hospitality solutions. While working on staff, I gained intimate knowledge of how to design for travel, what were the expectations of the customers, and the challenges facing hospitality management in the competition to gain more conversions online.

I worked with Kevin on a number of website projects while he was at TravelCLICK. He really performed various roles - as a highly talented and creative website designer, but also as a well-organized Senior Production Designer, piecing the websites he designed together so they were both visually appealing and also highly functional for the client. 

Ben Judy gets at the question of UX & Commercial sites at TravelClick

"...the differences between designing for different kinds of users. Particularly, building a website. Something that's very marketing oriented; or not necessarily marketing oriented, but you're trying to attract a broad audience of people to come and visit this site on the Web. And then there’s other kinds of design, like designing software applications that maybe just run on a desktop client.

There's a lot of different UX that the goes into those different scenarios. And of course now we’ve got the whole mobile world coming about, and there's all kinds of different UX that goes into designing a mobile experience."

My response:

So let's deal with the bad first. The bad is you do carry luggage in when you're doing commercial sites. And there are certain design scenarios that you know are going to solve certain problems in certain ways whenever you are doing commercial sites. And for the hotel industry there are specific things that you do, and you repeat them. And because you repeat them, you kind of expect certain results as a result of the repeating.

It can get, actually, in that respect it can get kind of scientific, and that lends some validity to your designs. Because through the use of these areas that you're building – such as where you place your booking mask on your site – will have a huge impact on your traffic to book the rooms at a hotel.

So you have a certain way that you do that, and you get the maximum results based on the data you get from where you are placing it. So if you place it in one place and you're not getting good results, you place it somewhere else and then you get better results. And you can extrapolate that data and then say that, “Okay, from now on we’re going to do this process."

So I would say that, coming from TravelClick, they have down to a science. And all their processes, as far as building commercial hotel websites – and large ones, too. It’s the reason we were able to work on projects such as Trump Hotels in Atlantic City, the Elegant Hotels out in Barbados, and so forth. Because of that scientific process and approach.

And the bad from that, bringing that in, is that you are accustomed to that kind of method. So you have a tendency to start thinking in that way whenever you’re doing a desktop application. And I’m going to say that interestingly enough, this is actually the same coin, but the bad side of the coin.

The good side of the coin is that sometimes that solves problems on a desktop application. In fact, I just got out of a meeting, interestingly enough, that was exactly covering taking a commercial solution and applying it to a desktop application, and it works very well – has solved the problem. Any other way I would not have thought of it, if I hadn’t had the commercial experience.

So there is good and bad. That’s one small example. You can extrapolate that into a larger – many other cases. I think that as a usability professional you have to start taking a snapshot in your head as to which one of those is the work. And I think experience and begin in the industry, and particularly in the travel industry, the longer you're in it, the more it’s just like anything else. You gather the experience and you start figuring out which ones are going to work. And you kind of know ahead of time which ones are going to work and which ones aren’t going to.

in that respect it can get kind of scientific, and that lends some validity to your designs. Because through the use of these areas that you’re building – such as where you place your booking mask on your site – will have a huge impact on your traffic to book the rooms at a hotel